


Melting from my Wings

by SummerFrost



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Ableism, Academic Pressure, Anxiety, Career Change, Dehumanization, Disordered Eating, Gen, I don't know how to tag this concisely there's too many feelings, Suicidal Ideation, Vomiting, commodification of intelligence/giftedness, family expectations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-10
Updated: 2017-12-10
Packaged: 2019-02-13 05:30:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12977070
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SummerFrost/pseuds/SummerFrost
Summary: Justin Oluransi wants to be a surgeon. Ransom plays hockey.





	Melting from my Wings

**Author's Note:**

> This fic has been months in the making, I think. I had trouble summing up the potentially triggering content in the tags, but I think I hit the major points. If you want to know more before you decide to read, I'm happy to talk about it in more detail.
> 
> Endless love to polyamorousparson, who beta'd. 
> 
> Title from Angel on Fire by Halsey.

“Justin? Justin, man, what’s up? Did you—did you sleep here, man?”

Ransom lifts his head off the table and blinks away the swirls in front of his vision. It’s Aaron, from his organic chemistry lecture. Fuck, what time is it? Nine AM. He slept here. He probably looks terrible. He probably looks—

“Oh, hey bro,” Ransom says. He smiles. “Nah, I’m just like, hella hungover man. You know how it is.”

Aaron laughs and claps Ransom on the shoulder. “Yeah, man. Gotta get our kicks in before we have no lives in med school, huh?”

_ Don’t touch me,  _ Ransom thinks. He laughs and says, “Uh, yeah.”

“Or, I mean,  _ I’ll  _ have no life,” Aaron continues. His sleeves aren’t rolled up the same amount and Ransom’s eye twitches. “You’re so fuckin’ smart it’ll probably be easy for you.”

“Oh.” Ransom scrubs a hand over his face. “Nah. You’re—I’m—I mean, thanks?”

Aaron pats Ransom on the arm again and says, “Sure. Catch ya around, man.”

He wanders off, leaving Ransom staring unfocused at where he used to be standing. His eyes feel all weird and dry and his stomach feels like it’s eating itself. He can’t remember the last time he ate, but it feels like anything he choked down would come right back up. He has a powerbar in his bag and he gags just thinking about getting it out.

Haha, wild.

His flashcards are splayed across the whole table, probably because he knocked them over when he fell asleep. He gathers them up and gets back to work.

 

~*~

 

Sarah catches up to Ransom right outside of the lecture hall and asks, “Hey, what’d you think?”

Ransom clenches his fingers a little tighter around his backpack strap so they stop shaking. “Oh, uh. Like, it was chill?”

“Yeah?” Sarah just looks at him. She has really big eyes.

Ransom shrugs. “I mean, the guy was kinda a dick, right? Like, he walks on water for funsies.”

“Oh, yeah.” Sarah laughs. She quirks her lips and rolls a strand of hair around her finger. “I guess you kinda have to be, to be a surgeon, though? They’ve all got God complexes.”

Ransom laughs too. “Yeah, I guess so. It’s, uh.” He looks at her again and suddenly feels small. “It’s a lotta pressure, like, being in control of someone’s life like that?”

Sarah is like, 5’4”. She shrugs and her bag falls off one of her shoulders. “Yeah, for sure. I mean, that’s why I wanna do, like, primary care or something probably. But you’d be awesome at it.”

“What?” Ransom looks around. They’re walking down the hallway and he kinda wants to lay down on the ground. His stomach hurts.

“’Cause you’re, like, so brilliant!” Sarah gushes. “I mean, some of our classmates?  _ Really  _ would not want them doing my neurosurgery. But you? You’re like, made for it.”

Ransom stops walking. Some dude crashes into him from behind and he turns around and apologizes, touching the guy’s shoulder automatically as he says he’s sorry.  _ Please don’t touch me.  _ He looks at Sarah, who’s smiling. It was funny. Haha.

“Whoops,” Ransom tells her. “Actually? I think I forgot my charger in the room? So I’ll like, catch you later?”

“Oh, um, okay?” Sarah asks, but she waves at him and walks away and then he’s alone again. It hurts. He doesn’t know what.

 

~*~

 

Justin Oluransi wants to be a surgeon. Pediatrics. He’s the top of his class and he gets drunk on the weekends because he’s smart enough that it doesn’t matter. On Monday morning all of his classmates will look at him when their professor asks the hard questions. He’s the only one who knows. Sometimes he wishes he didn’t.

 

~*~

 

Ransom is a hockey player. He throws up behind the loading dock because this game is standing between him and seventy pages of reading. It’s not anxiety. It’s guilt.

 

~*~

 

“What if I don’t want it?” Ransom asks.

His sister goes quiet on the other end of the line. She says, “I mean, you don’t  _ have  _ to do surgery. You could end up in, like, psychiatry.”

Ransom stares at the Bruins highlight reel he has paused on his computer. That’s not what he meant. He tells her, “Yeah, that’s true,” and gets off the phone.

 

~*~

 

“We know that you’re looking seriously at med schools,” Coach Hall tells him. They’re sitting in the coaches’ office after practice. “But we didn’t feel right keeping this from you.”

Ransom tries not to smile, but he does. He looks up at Hall and Murray and presses his fingertips into his knee. “Like, actual scouts? Asked about  _ me?” _

The coaches share a look. Murray says, “You’ve been a real standout this year, Ransom. I think that with a few years in the AHL—”

“I could  _ play,”  _ Ransom says. He doesn’t care where, it doesn’t matter. He’d live in the fucking A. “I could—guys, do you really think someone would sign me?”

“We, uh—we do.” Hall pushes his glasses up his nose. “But Ransom—we know that you’ve always wanted to be a doctor. You don’t have to pursue this out of obligation to the team or to us. It’s just something to think about.”

Ransom stops smiling. They’re looking at him like they just made his life harder. “Right,” he says. “I mean, yeah, med school is—obviously I should. But this is like, it’s cool, right? Like, plan B.”

“Yeah,” Coach Hall says. “Just see how this season goes.”

They send Ransom off to shower up. He looks down at his body, the aching places there are bruises. He knows the name of every muscle. He doesn’t care. Half his class failed the anatomy test. His body plays hockey.

 

~*~

 

“You just have so much to  _ give,  _ Justin,” his mother says. “Your mind is so beautiful. It would be such a waste.”

Ransom gets up and walks into the bathroom and hurls Christmas dinner into the toilet.  _ Waste, waste. _

 

~*~

 

“You belong in pediatrics,” his childhood development professor says. “I’ve never met someone so good with children.”

 

~*~

 

“Have you considered pharmacology?” the orgo professor asks. “Your test scores are top of the class.”

 

~*~

 

“Keep your head up, Oluransi!” Coach shouts. “You watch your own stick too much.”

Ransom smiles.

 

~*~

 

Holster shoves another boiled egg into his mouth. Ransom didn’t even see him peel that one, but, like, he probably did.

“But dude,” Holster says with his mouth full. “Don’t you wanna make the world a better place with your brain?”

Ransom’s hand shakes. His bite of pancakes falls off his fork. “But you can just like, go into soul-sucking corporate, right?”

“I’m not  _ smart  _ like you, bro.” Holster picks up another egg and crushes it to peel the shell off. The entire table is looking at them now. “Like,  _ dude.  _ If I had your fucking brain, don’t you think I’d be doing something with it?”

_ I’m doing something with it all the time,  _ Ransom thinks.  _ That’s how I’m alive. _

He shoves his tray away, towards Holster, and stands up. “Right, haha. Yeah, well, actually speaking of which? I totally forgot I’ve got a test tomorrow? So? Bye?”

Bitty looks over at him with his “I’m about to mother you” expression. “Rans, you should eat a little more—”

“There’s pie at the Haus, right?” Ransom asks him, and of course he nods. There’s always pie. No one cares what Bitty does with his brain as long as he feeds them. “Cool, I’ll eat that. Peace.”

His stomach hurts. He really should eat some pie. By the time he gets home he forgets.

 

~*~

 

Ransom looks down at his cell phone. He knows that Jack isn’t busy, because Bitty’s on the Amtrak to see him right now. He wishes he could just text, but, like, it’s Jack. So that probs wouldn’t work.

Jack picks up almost right away, though. “Rans? Is something wrong with—”

“How did you know hockey wouldn’t kill you?” Ransom asks. His voice sounds tinny, like he’s the one listening to it from the other end of a phone line.

Jack asks, “What?”

Ransom says, “Like, you know how when you think you love a thing but maybe it’s because everyone else says that you love the thing, and you think, like, how could literally everyone else be wrong about the thing I’m supposed to love? And you just keep doing it but it’s like, maybe you just don’t want everyone to hate you?”

“I…can’t tell if there was a question in there.”

Ransom laughs. This is a shit show. He shouldn’t have called. He’ll just tell him never mind and hang—

“Justin,” Jack says. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, dude.” Ransom laughs. Then stops laughing. “Nah. No. I don’t think so? I don’t know why I said yes. See? Why does everyone say I’m so smart if I don’t even know if I’m okay? Like, that’s wild.”

Jack gives him a minute, then says, “Bittle said you and Holster had a fight.”

“We don’t fight,” Ransom tells him automatically. “But like. I just keep thinking, like. How do you know if the pressure is like. Sometimes someone tells you how good you are, like—like you owe them something? And I keep thinking, like. How do you know if it’ll kill you. How do I—I keep thinking about med school and how no one sleeps and everyone hates it and I’m—uh, idk, man. I’m scared?”

Jack’s voice is gentle, but not in the scary way it used to get after practice, sometimes. He pushes, “Scared of what, Justin?”

“I’m not gonna kill myself!” Ransom blurts, because he’s afraid. And Jack is quiet, because they both know he gets it. “But what if it—what if it kills me?”

“If you have to ask,” Jack says, and it sounds like there should be more but he doesn’t finish the sentence for a long time. “Don’t.”

Ransom closes his eyes. They feel wet, but he isn’t a big crier and he probably won’t. “Don’t?”

“Hockey used to be for him,” Jack says slowly. “Uh. My dad. And it. You know. But it…changed. It’s for me, now, and that’s why I’m here. And you can’t—you don’t owe anyone. Fucking anything. If it’s not for you—that’s how it kills you.”

Ransom can feel his heart beating. He knows the names of all the arteries. He doesn’t care.

“Thanks, man,” he says, and it’s the easiest thing to say. He sits with it, with his heart beating because he has a body, and asks, “Uh. Do you know—do you know a good agent? If I was looking into hockey?”

He can feel Jack smiling through the phone. 

**Author's Note:**

> I love Ransom so, so much. Come scream with me about him [on Tumblr <3](http://yoursummerfrost.tumblr.com/)


End file.
